Existing application integration (AI) systems can utilize application views to simplify the way in which adapters are accessed in an enterprise. Application views provide a layer of abstraction between an adapter and any Enterprise Information System (EIS) functions exposed by that adapter. Instead of accessing an EIS by directly programming the EIS, a user can simply edit an application view for the adapter, create a new application view, or delete an obsolete application view. This layer of abstraction, formed by application views, makes it easy for non-programmers to maintain the services and events exposed by the adapter.
Each application view is specific to one adapter and can define a set of business functions on the EIS for that adapter. After an adapter is created, a Web-based interface for that adapter can be used to define application views. Such application views provide a view of the application capabilities exposed by an adapter. An application view can be used to hide as many of the system details from clients as possible. These details can include functionality for doing integration and interacting with enterprise information. The more system level details that are hidden from clients, the greater the chance of changing those details without affecting the clients. This is one reason for using an abstraction layer. If things that may change are abstracted, anything depending on those things may not need to change.
An application view can take advantage of a connection factory. A connection factory is an interface to a pool of connections for an information system. In present AI systems there is a one to one correspondence between application views and connection factories, such that when an application view is defined it is necessary to also define and deploy a connection factory to handle service invocations through a connector for that application view. This requirement of a one-to-one correspondence between application views and resources leads to undesirable definition and deployment repetition, as well as an undesirable consumption of resources.